Swedish-Japanese mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson has unveiled digital Walkman phones to tap into the mobile music market, seen as a top growth area for 2005.

The launch was made along with three other phones, including two new camera phones.

"It will now be possible to listen to music, handle phone calls and take great pictures and video, all with one device and with no compromise on quality," the group said in a statement.

The new W800 Walkman phones, which will be available early in the second half of 2005, will have large memory, good quality headphones and the ability to easily import tracks from a personal computer and other devices.

The company announced last month it would launch mobile phones with a built-in Walkman, the brand made famous by Sony's portable music cassette player.

"We are tapping into the Walkman heritage, reviving it," Chief Executive Miles Flint of the world's sixth-biggest mobile phone maker told Reuters in an interview last month.

More than 340 million Walkmans have been sold since their launch in 1979, but Sony has lost its lead in portable personal music after Apple introduced its iPod a few years ago.

The iPod stores thousands of songs in a digital format on a hard disk. Like other consumer electronics makers, Sony has meanwhile launched a hard-disk-based Walkman, as well as models working with flash memory chips, but its market share is tiny.

Sony Ericsson's larger rivals Nokia and Motorola also announced music phones last month. Nokia will work with Loudeye and Microsoft to combine open digital music formats with Windows Audio Player in its handsets. Motorola will combine open formats with Apple's iTunes format.

Sony Ericsson has said it will use open standards for compression and anti-piracy software in its audio player, and Sony has said it is on a strategy to adopt open standards in its online music store Connect.

Some of Sony Ericsson's models already feature a digital music player, but the new handsets will have more music playing features and will get access to Sony's Connect music store.

Sony Ericsson also said it would launch a 2 Megapixel camera phone, the K750, an entry-level camera phone, the K300, and a J300 phone which has a 3D gaming engine.

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